Is bounce rate that much important?

[LD]

I put absolutely no stock into bounce rate. High or low, it doesn't give you any real conclusions about how your site is performing. Who knows? The visitor might be back.

While betting the farm or spending a ton of time analyzing bounce data is not very efficient, keeping an eye on that stat is certainly worth some effort. There could be a half dozen good reasons to check once in a while, based on updates, changes to a site including index layout changes, adding page information, removal of page info or actual pages, etc. You just don't get out the magnifying glass or check hourly. IMO, if there is some noticible wild fluctuations, it's probably a byproduct of changes being done/made amongst a few other possibles.

[deepsand]

If one is convinced that bounce rate is a useful metric, i.e. one that affects conversion rate, then at least use the best possible data.

• Grab your server logs;
• Scrub them of visits from known crawlers/robots/spiders, scrapers, etc.;
• Scrub them of your own visits; then,
• Run them through a log file analyzer.

[timesheet]

To get traffic for website Bounce rate is important or not?

Bounce rate has nothing to do with getting traffic to a website. Bounce rate naturally comes with traffic and is a very important factor in analyzing the visitors stay on website. Actually you can reduce the bounce rate by making the website more user friendly and providing valuable content on it. Also, make your website design look better and to make the visitor dig into your website.

[deepsand]

Bounce rate ... is a very important factor in analyzing the visitors stay on website.

How so? If they bounce, there is no "stay" to analyze.

And, as Google's data at post #18 show, there is no correlation between bounce rate and conversion rate.

Actually you can reduce the bounce rate by making the website more user friendly and providing valuable content on it. Also, make your website design look better and to make the visitor dig into your website.

Maybe; maybe not. But, to what end?

As the cited Google data show, there is no correlation between bounce rate and time-on-site.

[deepsand]

If you do a search for antivirus software, go to the site and then click back, G will see the URL you just went to and then the referral website when you return to Google to do another search.

Unless you have browser caching disabled, Backspacing will not generate a new request for the SERP page that you just viewed.

All Google needs is a time/date stamped record of the SERP links that you clicked on, links that are to Google interstitial pages from which you are redirected to the intended target page, in order to determine an upper limit on how much time you spent on a given target site on a given visit.

While such ping-ponging may very well be a factor in determining personalized SERPs, it is not at all representative of a site's real bounce rate, as it is a measure of activity for traffic coming from one source only, Google. And, Google's software engineers are bright enough to know and understand this, so as to not use it as a generalized SERP input value.

[Eddie.S]

A website’s bounce rate calculates the percentage of visitors that leave the site after only visiting the landing page. Bounce rate is a beautiful way to measure the quality of traffic coming to your website.
In one tweet i have read that Matt Cutts said flat out (via second-hand news) that Google does not use Bounce Rate for ranking.If it is true that it is good news.But our goal is to convert as many visitors as possible and bring down the bounce rate.

[deepsand]

Bounce rate is a beautiful way to measure the quality of traffic coming to your website.

Poppycock.

.. our goal is to convert as many visitors as possible and bring down the bounce rate.

Had you bothered to read Google's own data, presented above, you would know that there is no correlation between bounce rate and conversion rate.

[TechEvangelist]

Bounce rate should be important to you as a site owner. It shows you the percentage of people that either did not find your site to be interesting or is not what they were searching for. I agree that there is no ideal bounce rate, but I personally view a bounce rate of over 50% as bad. There is nothing scientific about that number.

Matt Cutts made a statement at the recent SMX Conference about bounce rate. He said they do not look at it at all, so it is not an SEO factor.

Matt Cutts: Google Doesn’t Use Bounce Rate

[adymat]

In my view in some stances it does affect ranking factor... Like if a user hit a search phrase in Google. Thereafter the user click through a web search result of Google and quickly in a second or two returns back to Google search page to check for other search results for what he was looking for. It gives Google some signal that the concerned website is not useful for a particular kind(user looking for information, product etc.) of user and if it determines it is of no use to any set of users than it will simply remove the website or decrease it rankings after re-analyzing the said website.

Google I don't think use Google Analytics data of any website, but he(google ) is free to use stats coming from its own search results interaction with user to improve its user experience.

[deepsand]

Bounce rate should be important to you as a site owner. It shows you the percentage of people that either did not find your site to be interesting or is not what they were searching for.

How can you say that in light of what has already been said that counters it?

To put it tersely, a high bounce rate may indicate that your visitors are finding exactly what they want/need on the landing page itself.